Awful - even for a no-brains Blockbuster

Rating: 3/10 (17 October 2013)

What the hell was that? I'm as much a fan of sitting back and enjoying some popcorn- style, CGI-induced mayhem as anyone but this was truly awful. With someone like Del Toro at the helm you expect at least a little bit in the way of sympathetic, fun characters you can care about - but someone got in the way of allowing him to exercise any of his Hell Boy wit or sense of magic and wonder. It's like a bad version of a Michael Bay film(which is really saying something). Like the producers had a mission: to be bigger, better and louder than Bay. The result being that the actors out-overact Bay's actors with the unfortunate disadvantage of not having the acting chops to pull it off. Every scene is strained and over-elaborate, just like in Bay films, but even more so. It veers into farce and ridiculous melodrama, devoid of sentiment and involvement. How anyone can care about any of the characters is beyond me - whatever depth they've been given is quashed with every shouty, fake-teary-eyed confrontation that take up surprisingly and unnecessarily long swathes of the epic running time.
Don't get me wrong - every film of this nature has the same predictability and cliché- ridden plot structure and character arcs. But Shia Lebeouf is capable of eliciting sympathy and the odd smile and Pirates has Johnny Depp and Armageddon has Bruce Willis shedding a tear. Pacific Rim has a B-list cast who lack charisma and most importantly they lack joy, wit, fun. Transformers had John Turturro and John Malkovich as comic relief instead of two pastiche, pseudo-comedian, cabaret revue 'actors' doing one of those duo acts where no one in the audience is laughing or paying attention except for when it's their turn to throw rotten fruit. The science duo are not just palpitations-inducingly annoying but they also get reels and reels of screen time - managing to be more nauseating than Jar-jar in the process. The main character acts and looks like a cheap version of Channing Tatum or Josh Hartnett and his Japanese side-kick spends the whole movie in tears. Idris Elba and Ron Perlman are the only characters with any kind of gravitas but are sadly lost in a sea of melodramatic absurdity.
Now - obviously this film is all about Giant Robots vs. Giant Aliens so the above should be totally irrelevant. So why spend such an inordinate amount of time developing these rice paper thin characters? I don't care about plot holes and over- long exposition scenes in these kind of films - it's part of it. But if the film decides to have a lengthy story between relatively short mega-action set pieces then give them a worthy script and cast some decent actors. Also, make us excited about finally seeing these beasts and these magnificent machines fighting it out instead of showing us everything in the exposition intro. One of the great aspects of these films is the way the director gets to slowly build towards the mayhem. Here we are in it from the beginning - like it's normal. Massive oversight. And for God's sake don't set the final fight in an environment where the scale of the beasts and robots are rendered entirely irrelevant. Reminded me of Ang Lee's Hulk. Wrong part of the film to play it safe. Look to Avengers and the latest Transformers for how to massively up the ante for the final battle.
I expected Battleship to be terrible but watchable - it was. I expected this to be ridiculous - it was. But not in the way it should have been. It should have been ridiculously fun but instead had us sit through a masterclass in poor scripting and acting with far too little of the thing that was written on the tin.